


drink with me from the cold bitter cup

by halfpenny



Series: Blood on the Saddle [1]
Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: F/M, Wild West AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-15
Updated: 2009-12-15
Packaged: 2017-11-12 06:56:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/487979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halfpenny/pseuds/halfpenny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If she’d been alive to see her husband’s wake, if one could even use that word for the shabby affair in a lean-to shack behind the General Store, Christine was positive Amelia LeGrange Chapel’s heart would have snapped right in two.</p>
            </blockquote>





	drink with me from the cold bitter cup

 

It was days like this Christine thanked the good Lord in heaven that her mamma died of fever back in New Orleans. If she’d been alive to see her husband’s wake, if one could even use that word for the shabby affair in a lean-to shack behind the General Store, Christine was positive Amelia LeGrange Chapel’s heart would have snapped right in two. If she’d been asked five years ago, after the disastrous end to the War of Northern Aggression, where she would be, Christine would have had a beautiful answer. She’d be married, of course, and living in a nice house in the city with white lace curtains in her very own parlor. Sometimes late at night, she’d picture those curtains, blowing softly in the breeze, a brilliant white against the darkness behind her eyes, and she’d ache for that stillborn life, a world away and never to be.

Christine took another sip of cloudy water from her tin cup and winced. There were too many bodies here. Jimmy the Sheriff and his railroad friend from St. Louis with the foreign-sounding name, Sprock or something, stood off to one side, looking uncomfortable and too tall in the small room. A smattering of miners from the town outskirts and others her father had treated over the years milled around, covertly passing glass bottles of whiskey or beer between them. And on the table in the middle, laid out in his finest black suit, lay Winston R. Chapel, physician.

Christine sat next to him in a straight-backed chair in a pressed black dress. She’d had it since they’d first arrived in South Pass City, Wyoming, and even though the seams had been let out as far as they’d go, it was still too short and Christine worried about Jimmy eyeing her ankles. But he’d been a perfect gentleman, tipping his hat and muttering, “Sorry Ma’am, was a good doc, your daddy, ma’am,” until Christine had waved him off, his duty done. His strange dark friend had nodded gravely and Christine had nodded back, glad of his silence.

When she’d shaken hands with the last of the gold-panners and sent them off to Mr. Scott’s for alcohol and quite possibly, loose female companionship, Christine had finally let herself lean back into the unyielding wood of the rough-hewn chair. Splinters poked through the stiff linen of her petticoats, but she ignored them. In a few hours, a gang of Sulu’s Chinamen would come to bury what was left of her father in the hard, dry dirt. No preacher would say words over him and no tombstone would mark the place where he lay, not out of spite but out of desperation, for there were no men to do either job a hundred miles in any direction.

Christine didn’t think he would mind overmuch. He’d always believed that if God was anywhere, He was in the ground under our feet, not in the cold empty sky above. Or at least he had believed until Mamma died and the bottle had become his religion, the saloon his temple. After he’d showed up drunk to the hospital for the fifth time and the bank began ignoring Christine’s pleas about the mortgage, West was the only direction left to them. They’d made it as far as Wyoming before the money ran out and ten miles off the Oregon Trail was a booming little gold town called South Pass. It seemed as good a place as any, her daddy had declared, and settled down to the business of drinking himself to death. _Well Daddy,_ Christine thought as she lifted one cold, pale hand into hers, _you’ve finally done it. You’re finally free_.

And then she began to cry.

*

It was late by the time Christine had left the lean-to, puffy-eyed and exhausted, and walked the short distance down the main street to the tall, thin building she’d come to know as home. The rooms were on the second floor, above what passed for a town hall, and the wooden stairs groaned with every step. Shutting the door behind her, Christine took a moment to look around. She knew she should be grateful, two entire rooms to herself was practically a mansion out here, but now the extra bed loomed large under the window, her father’s pillow still bearing the impression of his head. Sobs flared up in her chest, but she was all cried out and could only crawl onto the rumpled sheets that smelled like alcohol and cotton gauze and her father. She wrapped herself up in the threadbare blankets and breathed him in, the smell of his sickness and all, knowing full well that with on trip to the wash house, all that was left of her father would be gone from this earth.

A sharp knock at the door brought her back to the moment. She untangled herself and smoothed her hair back, tucking loose pieces back into the demure chignon. She opened the door, expecting to see Mariah Candice from the brothel with a batch of fresh bruises that needed tending or even Mr. Wilkinson, saying his wife’s baby was finally on the way. But Jimmy stared back at her and Christine opened the door to a more friendly width. “Evening Sheriff,” she said, her voice low and hoarse from grieving. “Is there trouble?”

Jimmy smiled that crooked smile and doffed his hat, blond hair mussed and becoming in the candlelight. “No ma’am, Miss Chapel, no trouble. Just needed a moment of your time.”

Christine pushed the door open. “Won’t you come in?”

Jimmy shifted uneasily. “Uh, I don’t know if I should, miss.”

Christine laughed and it sounded bitter even to her. “What’s the matter, James? Afraid someone will tell my father?” Jimmy flinched and Christine immediately regretted saying it. But it was the truth and she refused to apologize for speaking the truth, and Jimmy stepped inside.

“Well Miss Chapel, given the terrible loss of your father, I was wondering if you’d be leaving us too.” Christine must have looked as confused as she felt because Jimmy continued, “Maybe go back to your people in New Orleans or even on to California.”

Christine thought of her mother in the ground of Louisiana and her father in the ground here. “I don’t have any people, Sheriff,” she said. “Besides, I’m needed here.”

Jimmy began twisting the brim of his hand through his fingers, something he did when he was trying to charm his way out of an unpleasant situation. “Yes ma’am, but surely a fine lady like you, city-bred, would want to get back to civilization. Maybe find yourself a nice husband.” Christine narrowed her eyes and Jimmy twisted faster. “After all, what with the terrible loss of your father—”

“—you already said that, James—”

“—the new doc will be stepping in soon.”

Christine froze. “New doctor?” she asked. Jimmy nodded, miserable and official, and Christine sat down hard on the edge of her bed. A new doctor for South Pass City. A man to take her father’s place. No, not her father’s place. _Her_ place.

“Sheriff Kirk,” she said, standing again, “I believe you know as well as I that we already have all the help we need in that capacity.” Jimmy looked away. They’d never discussed this. No one had ever discussed this. If on occasion, the doctor’s daughter had treated a case of croup or childbed fever when her father was on a bender, no one breathed a word. And if on occasion turned into oftentimes turned into more than the good doctor himself, not one person mentioned a thing. She was a good daughter, a proper lady, and if the town was taken care of, nobody much thought to ask who held the stethoscope. “After all,” she blazed on, “just last year, the government passed a law says women can vote in the local elections. And—”

“Chrissy,” Jimmy said, eyes full of sympathy. “It’s done, he’s on his way.” Christine could feel moisture gathering at the corners of her eyes, but since she was all out of tears, she assumed it must be blood. Jimmy plunged on, ignoring the rage shaking through her like an earthquake, “After all, voting in a fixed election is one thing, but a lady doctor? Now that’s just plain tomfoolery.”

It was only then that Christine collapsed to her knees, unable to stand under the weight of how unfair her life had become. Jimmy rushed to her, but he didn’t matter. She wanted to die. She wanted to scream at her father, smug and safe in heaven, _how could you do this to me, I never asked for any of this, I don’t belong here._ Jimmy helped her to her feet and murmured platitudes about always looking out for her and protecting her, as if anyone could be protected at all from this world. As he was leaving, Christine found her voice again. “What’s his name?” she croaked.

Jimmy paused and looked over his shoulder. “McCoy. Leonard McCoy.”

*

The new doctor didn’t show up the next day or the next week, and before long, Christine was able to put him out of her mind all together. People kept coming to her with injuries and illnesses, and she doled out medicine from her father’s dwindling supplies and advice about how to cure colic or treat miner’s cough. It wasn’t the life she wanted, not even the life she expected, but the work was steady—plenty wrong with the hardy folk on the frontier—and it kept her from thinking about the empty place at her supper table more often than not.

In the evenings, she mended the holes in her dresses with patches of heavy flannel and read from the medical tomes in her father’s limited library. She realized long ago that she was smart, smarter than most, and if she had any hope of a normal life, she had better hide that particular fact under a heap of feminine skills. So she read and she crocheted and some afternoons, when the men were all at work or sleeping it off, she crept into the saloons and picked out all the Chopin she could remember on the out-of-tune piano. She wasn’t happy, not with her father still fresh in the ground, but she wasn’t unhappy either. She simply was and as long as Leonard McCoy, usurper, kept away from South Pass City, she thought she might do all right.

Autumn arrived, a wet season that filled the gulches and beat against the wooden walls of her rooms. Cracks in the window let the chilly gusts of prairie air to cut through her clothes to the skin. Christine took to wrapping two of her woolen shawls around herself while she worked relabeling the brown bottles of morphine and packets of powders. It was dark out, but then it got dark in the middle of the day now that winter was coming on. Christine would need to pack away her summer dresses soon and shake the mothballs out of her woolen stockings. It had yet to snow, but the rain was almost worse, scowering the town buildings until nearly everything swelled and warped.

Christine had treated two of Scotty’s ladies of the evening already this week for a particularly persistent rash, so when the knock came well into the night, she assumed it was one of the girls. Fussing at her hair, she opened the door without looking and a man pushed his way inside. His rucksack slammed into her and knocked her far enough off balance that she staggered. The bag was the dropped unceremoniously on the floor, rainwater pooling beneath it.

The man was tall, as tall as Jimmy, and soaking wet. His hat was plastered to his head and the brim sagged in front of his face. There was a rifle slung across his back and a pistol glinted in the candle light at his hip. Beneath the dust and grim on his clothes, he wore a vest and kerchief instead of a cravat and suit coat. The only thing to distinguish him from any other gun fighter was the black square bag he carried in one hand. _Oh God_ , Christine thought wildly. _The devil comes to town_. But since that made no sense, she put it out of her head. It was then that propriety reasserted itself. “Sir, you have no business coming into a lady’s personal boudoir, in the middle of the night, no less.”

He doffed his hat and Christine stared. In the low light of her storm lantern, his face was half in shadow. Wide dark eyes, full beard, a heavy serious mouth already set in a frown. Christine dropped her eyes to the floor and tugged her shawls tighter around her shoulders.

He nodded, slowly, as if he was unsure of the correct action to perform. “Howdy ma’am,” he said and his voice was a low scrape against Christine’s skin. “I do apologize for barging in so late, but I’m meant to stay here.”

Christine shook her head. “I’m sorry, but that’s not possible.”

He frowned more deeply, his wide face a mass of exhaustion. “ ‘Fraid it is, ma’am. These are the doctor’s quarters.” And suddenly Christine felt ill as the room swooped around her. The stranger wiped one dripping hand on his sopping trouser leg and pulled a damp page out of his rucksack, a letter in her father’s careful familiar hand. The pit of Christine’s stomach dropped out from under her as he nodded once more, sure of himself now. “The name’s McCoy. Leonard McCoy. Who’re you?”

Christine holds perfectly still in her curtainless room and damns him for drawing breath.

  



End file.
